Russians have
second thoughts
By Israel Shamir
Russia is different. The Americans,
the Brits and the French by and large approve of their
forces’ Libya bombing spree (yes, some doubt that it’s a
good bang for the buck). The Russians are flatly against
it, with no ifs, ands or buts. The Russian Ambassador in
Tripoli, Vladimir Chamov, came back to a hero's welcome
in Moscow. President Dmitri Medvedev had dismissed him
publicly after the Ambassador sent him a cable. In the
five-points cable leaked to media, the Ambassador called
Medvedev’s response to Libya crisis a “betrayal of
Russian national interests”. (Meanwhile, the sides
climbed down a bit: the Foreign Office said Chamov was
not “fired”, just “called back” from Tripoli, and
retained his ambassadorial rank and salary, while Chamov
denied he had used the word “betrayal”.)
The Russians do not like the Western
intervention in Libya. The rebels do not appear genuine,
note the Russian bloggers; they are a peculiar mixed bag
of Kaddafi’s ex-ministers fired for corruption, al-Qaeda
mujahedeen, well-clod riff-raff beefed up by SAS
soldiers and supported by these best friends of every
Arab, American cruise missiles. The Russian media
discovered that the first reports of massive civil
casualties inflicted by the ruthless Kaddafi apparently
were invented by editors in London and Paris. More
civilians were killed by the Western intervention than
by the government fighting the rebels. The
mass-readership Komsomolskaya Pravda published
reports from the Russian expats in Libya that flatly
disproved claims of Kaddafi’s planes bombing residential
quarters: this was done by the French and British
bombers.
The Russians tend to a conspiratorial
view of politics. They presume that the Arab risings
were organised by their enemy: some “orange” Western
forces, NED, CIA, Mossad, you name it, in order to
create chaos, Iraq-style. They quote Israeli and
American doctrines for the promotion of “constructive
chaos”.
And then they support Kaddafi, or
even feel sympathy for Mubarak. This is especially true
for patriotic Russians who remember that Kaddafi stood
by Russia in 2008 during the Georgia conflict, and for a
business community who were involved in many projects in
Libya from gas to railways.
President Dmitri Medvedev has good
reason to regret the haste with which he joined in the
Western media onslaught, for he will be blamed for what
already looks to Russians as Kosovo II. Probably he was
misled by his media advisers who suggested he should
jump on the internationally-acceptable media bandwagon
of “stop the massacre in Libya”, and on he jumped. The
first reports of the alleged massacre were still
reverberating when President Medvedev warned Kaddafi of
“crimes against humanity”, and later on he added that
Kaddafi is persona non grata in Russia. Medvedev
supported the decision to pass Libya’s case to ICC;
though by that time he could have learned from the
Russians present in Libya that nothing all that
extraordinary took place in the country; that it was
nothing beyond a small-scale rising on the way to being
put down. It could be compared to Los Angeles riots of
1965 (threescore dead and thousands wounded) or of 1992
(fifty dead and thousands wounded), except that the LA
blacks had no Tomahawks for aerial support.
Medvedev is also perceived as the man
who ordered his Ambassador in the Security Council to
abstain. Russia and China usually vote in agreement if
they intend to go against the will of the world sheriff
– ever since the
fateful Zimbabwe vote in
2008 when Russia activated its veto for the first time
since God-knows-when and stopped the West-proposed
sanctions against the African nation. Then, the BBC
reported, the UK foreign secretary David Miliband said
Russia used its veto despite a promise by President
Dmitry Medvedev to support the resolution. This time,
apparently, Medvedev prevailed and acquiesced in what
looks now as another Suez campaign (if you can still
remember 1956, when the Brits and the French had tried
to liberate Egypt from its Hitler-on-the-Nile, Gamal
Abdel Nasser, and keep the Canal for themselves).
A few days later, the strongman of
Russia, Vladimir Putin, roundly criticised this step of
Medvedev; he called the Western intervention, “a new
crusade”, and proposed the Western leaders should “pray
for their souls and ask the Lord’s forgiveness” for the
blood shed. People loved it. Medvedev tried to rebuff
with a meaningless “don’t you speak of crusades”, but
even he could not find anything positive about the NATO
campaign in Libya.
Now as always, the Russians’ gut
reaction is against any Western intervention. They were
against American interventions in Vietnam and Korea,
Iraq and Afghanistan, against British and French
colonial wars – just like you
were, my wonderful readers, the enlightened spiritual
minority in the West. The
Russians do not believe that the reasons for the Western
intervention have anything to do with love of democracy,
human rights or value of human life. For them, a rose is
a rose is a rose, a Western intervention is a Western
intervention, one of many they were on the receiving end
of.
However, Medvedev did not let the
Western intervention march on for purely sentimental
reasons of “supporting Europe”. The idea is, better let
NATO be occupied in the South than in the East. Libya is
much less important for Russians than Georgia, Ukraine
or even Afghanistan. If this beast has to eat somebody,
let it better be somebody in the Maghreb, where the
Russians never had strong positions anyway. A
WPR writer called this
turn a “Tilsit moment” for NATO: acknowledging the
immutability of the West’s Eastern borders in exchange
for a free hand in the South flank. That is why Poland
was unhappy with the Odyssey Dawn operation: instead of
being on the frontline of the most important
confrontation, this southern switch left the Poles in a
geopolitical cul-de-sac.
Indeed we should not be captivated by
East-West thinking. As the US slowly declines, the
European powers begin to reassess their role. The Libya
war is a French project. The Libya war was started by
Sarkozy as an attempt to rebuild the French Empire in
North Africa fifty years after the Evian treaty
ostensibly sealed its fate. This was his old idea, and
he called for the establishment of a
Mediterranean Union during
his election campaign. The MU project
was supported by Israelis – and now
Bernard Henry Levy is the foremost proponent on the
intervention. Turkey strongly opposed the MU and now the
Turks oppose the intervention in their subtle way, as
Eric Walberg has correctly
described. Italy supported the MU and expectedly
supported the intervention. Germany was against the MU
and is against the intervention. From this point of
view, the intervention in Libya is the beginning of a
new wave of European colonization of the Maghreb.
A Russian observer
noticed an uncanny
resemblance of this operation to one that occurred one
hundred years ago in Libya during the previous
colonisation wave. Then, recently united aggressive
Italy in search for its empire decided to seize Libya,
an Ottoman province. Then, as now, the newspapers wrote
of freedom-loving Libyans suffering under the Ottoman
heel and of the Italians’ moral duty to liberate them.
The Turks were in a bad shape and they tried to find a
face-saving way to surrender. They proposed to hand
Libya over to Italians for management and colonization
provided the suzerainty should remain with the Sublime
Porte. The Italians refused, and their Dawn Odyssey
began. The Turks fought valiantly, and among them a
young officer proved his valour: that was Mustafa Kemal,
later nicknamed Ataturk. A lone voice against
intervention was that of young Italian socialist Benito
Mussolini. The Italians’ Libya campaign was the first
ever air bombing, exactly one hundred years ago in 1911,
and history has preserved the name of the first bomber,
Flt Lt Giulio Gavotti, who was the first man ever to
perform a bombing run.
Modern Russia is not the USSR; it has
few world-wide ambitions. It is worried about its own
part of the world, and is not keen to get involved
elsewhere. For the Russians, Europe’s drive south is not
a threat, rather a resumption of France’s regional role.
That is why the Russians abstained at UNSC. So it will
be the task of the enlightened forces of the West to
stop the aggression – instead of relying on the Russian
veto.
President Kaddafi succeeded in
annoying a lot of people in a lot of places. He annoyed
both the French and the Russians by striking deals and
then not sticking to them. Wikileaks cables refer to
that many times, notably in 10PARIS151
saying: “the French are growing increasingly frustrated
with the Libyans' failure to deliver on promises
regarding visas, professional exchanges, French language
education, and commercial deals. ""We (and the Libyans)
speak a lot, but we've begun to see that actions do not
follow words in Libya." He annoyed the Saudis and worse,
he annoyed his own people.
We are certainly against the
intervention; but the case of supporting Kaddafi is not
all that clear-cut. Muammar Kaddafi was/is a dual
figure: on one hand, an autochthonous leader who
provided his countrymen with the highest standard of
living in Africa, with generous subsidies, free medical
care and education, who supported the vision of One
State in Palestine/Israel and befriended Castro and
Chavez. On the other hand, for the last five years
Kaddafi and his clique have been busy dismantling the
Libyan welfare state, privatising and cannibalising
their health and education systems, hoarding wealth,
dealing with transnational oil and gas companies to
their personal advantage. The “New Kaddafi” took away a
lot of social achievements and did not give his people
elementary political freedoms. His support of One State
in Palestine dried up in 2002, a long time ago.
My friends in Tripoli do not support
Kaddafi. They are certainly against western
intervention, but they dislike the old colonel for his
dictatorial habits. They are grown-ups, they want to be
involved in the decision-making, they do not like
corruption, they also want bigger role for Islam. In
their eyes, Kaddafi kept his anti-imperialist rhetoric
for public use, but his praxis was Western and
neo-liberal. It is fine that Kaddafi teased the Saudi
royals and brandished his sword against the western
leaders; but at the same time he gave away Libyan wealth
to the foreigners. So while certainly standing against
the intervention, we should not forget that not all
anti-Kaddafi forces are Western stooges or al-Qaeda
fighters.
Politics do not provide a bed of
laurels to recline on. With all due respect to Muammar
Kaddafi and his past achievements, he overstayed his
prime time. There are reasons to hope he will survive
the storm; we heartily wish him the defeat of the
interventionist forces. But that should be a departure
point for democracy in Libya, not necessarily
democracy-European style, but a better way for Libyans
to participate in forging their own lives.
(Follow-up: Russian politics in Libya
Mirror)